Random US town generator

How big is the pool?

The pool shrinks quickly as the minimum population rises:

• 1,000+ people: 10,255 places
• 5,000+ people: 4,876 places
• 10,000+ people: 3,206 places
• 50,000+ people: 817 places
• 100,000+ people: 342 places
• 1,000,000+ people: 11 places

By state, TX has the most places in the list, 804, and HI has the fewest, 1. So a draw with no state filter favors states with many small incorporated towns.

How the draw works

The tool filters the Census list of incorporated places to your state and minimum population, sorts the matches in a fixed order, and picks one using a seeded random number. The seed goes into the page address after the # sign together with your filters, so anyone opening the link sees the same town.

Every town in the filtered pool has the same chance. The draw is not weighted by population, so a town of 1,200 is as likely as a city of a million. Raise the minimum population to lean toward larger places.

What you get for each town

Each pick shows the Vintage 2024 population, the Census internal point in decimal degrees, and the county it falls in, found with the same point-in-polygon test as the county finder. The county links to its page with ranks and nearby counties. The globe is centered on the town so you can see where it sits.

What is not in the pool

Places under 1,000 people are excluded. Census-designated places, which are unincorporated communities, are excluded too, because the subcounty population estimates behind this list cover incorporated places only. That is why Hawaii contributes a single entry, Urban Honolulu. The draw runs in your browser and nothing about your picks is sent to this site. For a random point anywhere on Earth, use the random location generator.

How the shareable link reproduces a pick

A pick is fully determined by three values: the state filter, the minimum population, and a seed number between 1 and about 2.1 billion. The seed feeds a small deterministic random number generator, which returns the same first number every time for the same seed. That number chooses a position in the filtered list, which is sorted by state, then name, then latitude, so the list order never changes between visits.

If the underlying place list is updated with a new Census vintage, an old link may land on a different town, because the list itself changed. The page states the data vintage in the sources block so you can tell when that has happened. To keep a record of a pick, note the town name and state along with the link.

Narrowing the draw

The state filter limits the pool to one state's places. The population filter sets a floor, so choosing 50,000+ leaves only larger cities in the pool. Change either filter and press Pick a town again for a fresh draw from the new pool.